That is the question, isn’t it? In this monetary-based system of thought, we always ask that one, and the follow-up: What was the price paid, and was it worth it? Are the two questions and issues divisible, or are they inseparably linked like Siamese twins sharing a vital organ?

As to the first, the question can encompass an entanglement of intricate complexities that flow from the second — when, in fact, it is a simple question requiring merely a fundamental answer. We ask first, What is the price paid?

We begin to hem and haw and hesitate: Well, it was really beautiful and I’ve always wanted it and it was worth it because it brought back the warmth of childhood memories and…. Once such explanations and justifying delineations occur, you have conflated the second issue into the first; for, the first requires a simple and straightforward answer: the dollar-amount; a monetarily-objective response; a unit from a designated numerical set, etc. Thus: “I bought X”. “How much did you pay for it?” “It was priced at X-dollars, and I purchased it for Y-amount”.

Then, the inevitable follow-up: “Was it worth it?” It is this second question that evokes a conflation with the first; for, such a query is not so simple inasmuch as it involves psychology, emotion, rational and irrational underpinnings, and the subjective encompassment of often-unexplainable attachments.

The worth of a thing may not parallel the price of it; for, what what paid for it can spread throughout a spectrum of differentiating circumstances: Perhaps one got a bargain; maybe the seller didn’t realize the true market value and vastly underpriced it; or, it may be that a person needed to do a “quick sale” because he needed the cash, and was willing to part with it at a basement-bargain price, etc.

Take the following hypothetical: At an auction, a painting is bid upon. It is a rather unassuming piece that depicts a woman, fully clothed, with a slight smile. It is not an exceptional painting, and is expected to be auctioned off for about a thousand dollars. The bidding begins, and very quickly, it becomes clear that primarily 2 individuals are vying for the painting — one, a very wealthy individual; the other, a middle-class bloke barely able to meet his monthly debts. The bidding exceeds the expected price to be gained by the auctioneer, which makes him happy beyond description.

This is the cake that dreams are made of for the auction house that expects very little: Two or more individuals who are willing to pay a price exceeding the monetary worth of the item. After a series of back-and-forth bids, the middle-class bloke wins the bid — at $20,000.00. When later asked about it, he replies: “The painting reminds me of my mother.” Bankrupt and considered a fool by everyone in the neighborhood, he nevertheless feels for the rest of his life that it “was worth it”.

Now, turn the hypothetical around and let’s say that the wealthy man won the bidding. When asked about it, he simply stated: “Oh, I was just bored. I plan on trashing the painting when I get home, but it was exciting to just rob someone else of his desire and pleasure.” In either case, was the price paid “worth” it?

That is the question that Federal and Postal workers have to answer when determining whether or not to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset — the price of one’s health; whether it is worth continuing in a job or career that persists upon a track to demoralize, deteriorate and destroy one’s health; or, whether a reduced income at the price of being able to focus upon one’s health may be “worth” it.

Preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through OPM itself has a price — of the long wait, the complex administrative process and the stress of waiting; but like the painting being bid upon at the auction house, it is always the balancing of the price paid and the worth of the gain that must be considered when preparing, formulating and filing for OPM Disability Retirement benefits.

There is always something in the way, isn’t there? That’s one of life’s paramount rules, a presumptive nuisance, an annoyance that hinders and obstructs. It is one of those “laws” that we all laugh about, whether Murphy’s or some uncle who visits and has the talent to always put a damper on things; or maybe it is just a trite truism of life that cannot ever be avoided.

You can come up with the greatest idea in the universe, and best of dreams that are about to come true — and then the “it” comes upon the scene. Impediments represent the spoiler that dampens the soul, treads upon the glory of an anticipated morning’s future, and follows us with the proverbial dark clouds or like pig-pen’s constant swirl of dirt and grime.

You excitedly share your dreams and hopes, speaking quickly and with urgency of youth, enthusiasm or an admixture of both; and you get the tepid response of, “Aw, it’ll never work.” Or, you believe you have uncovered the key to life’s success, come running home — to parents who have endured a lifetime of disappointments or to a spouse who has just been taking care of 3 boisterous children — open the door with a stupid smile, start to relate your great insight, and you are told: “Great. Now, will you please take out the garbage?”

Impediments are the lifeline to reality’s check upon our own foolhardiness; or, for the eternal optimist, they reflect the greater challenge that tests our skills in gauging our sincerity, endurance, integrity and reliability.

Medical conditions constitute such an impediment. We take such things as health and the daily ability to get up in the morning, take a shower and go to work — those ordinary things in life that we all presume everyone the world over does in a similar fashion — for granted. But then that horrid and feared “medical condition” creeps up on us, and suddenly we cannot do those things we once never even thought about, and it is that impediment that begins to gnaw away at one’s soul.

For the Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker who has experienced not only the impediment of the medical condition itself, but the greater hindrance from the manner in which the Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service has begun in their campaign of harassment and intimidation, preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often the best pathway around the impediment.

No, it may not be a brilliant idea, and nor even a greater insight than what the ordinary ho-hum person may come up with when confronted with the same or similar situation. But maybe it was never meant to be — and that those brilliant ideas can come about after the approval received from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, when the Federal or Postal employee has less worries about one’s future, and then you can expend your energies coming up with ideas to save the planet, become the next Einstein, or just plainly have the time to take out the garbage.

Time was, every family had a picture album – that anachronism bound carefully in a large leather book-shaped monstrosity, kept safe where dust settles and mice scurry around; taken out for occasions where boredom is accentuated and friends or neighbors have stayed long past their welcome, and so it is taken out carefully, dusted off and laboriously paged through, telling of a history for each page, each photograph laid meticulously upon the thick plaster-backboard of a person’s history.

It used to be that we all had one picture for an event – or, two at most, once Peoples Drug (for those who are old enough to remember; and that, in and of itself, was somewhat of a historical marker – when “Peoples” Drug – the drugstore of the “people”, was bought out by successive entities of greater reserve until it finally became a nondescript, boringly corporate entity under the designation of “CVS”; somehow, something was lost when the corner drugstore started in a suburb of D.C. was engulfed by mergers and corporate purchases) declared a two-for-one sale.

Of course, we all kept in safekeeping those brownish negatives that neatly fit into those thin plastic columns (i.e., thrown into a drawer based upon the sequence of receipt) – you know, the ones you hated to slide out because you could never get it back in without bending them, and somehow you suspected that they were never meant to be fit within the columns of plastic in the first place.

Somehow, there was something quaint and innocent about a picture album that only had one shot of a slice of life that told a limited tale about a person’s continuum of historical detail – by contrast, today’s Smartphone and digital chip that can hold literally thousands of photographs, and the person who is willing to show all in a public display for everyone in the universe to see, by downloading, uploading, displaying and replaying, for a person barely in his or her twenties.

The picture album is an anachronism, telling in its humility, limited access and manifesting a humble origin of consciousness. It is a relic that bifurcates a “before” and an “after” – of a time now gone and lost forever, replaced by an after that manifests a change most of us never asked for.

To that end, the picture album is likened to a Federal or Postal employee with a medical condition. That Federal or Postal employee suffers from a history of that which most of his or her coworkers are completely unaware of. And like the picture album that is taken out from the dusty bookshelves of a corner closet, when the Federal or Postal employee comes to a point of needing to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the reaction displayed by others is often one of boredom, lack of concern or even of interest shown in forced phoniness. For, what others know or find out about a person’s life – even of his or her medical condition – is ultimately a private slice of life that is shared with quiet discretion.

Have you ever seen a flower arrangement that weaves together deadwood with bright and colorful summer explosions? They tell us of that which reflects modernity: The dead are forgotten in the background; the sick and dying are mere echoes fading quickly into a distant past; and it is only the vigorous who dominate and forcefully remain in the forefront.

How a society coordinates the interaction between the triad of life’s complex ingredients reveals the extent of its inner soul and character. For, how many of us truly want to live in a pure State of Nature, where only the brute strength of predatory behavior would rule? How many of us would survive in such a dystopian world, and for how long?

How we treat the remains, vestiges and memories of those gone; what we do with the ones still alive but deteriorating, suffering and lonely in their abandoned abodes; and whatever is left for the youth, what value of transference is imparted from the traditions longstanding, the obligations imparted, and the core values embraced – these determine the viability of a society in turmoil.

For, the dead reveal in constancy as to who we are by giving us a past; the dying, what we are made of by the example of how we treat the least of our community; and the value of youth is inherent in the lineage existent for the future continuation of a viable and vibrant tradition; and it is always the interrelationships between the tripartite worlds that determine whether and how.

We tend to want to compartmentalize, then to isolate each into their individual components such that one never interrelates with another. But reality often will force a society to reflect upon such an artificial manner of conceptual isolationism, and sometimes it is by mere change of perspective that can lead to a paradigm shift of sorts.

Thus does this happen when we see a flower arrangement that artfully weaves the deadwood of winter with the vibrant colors of spring, and allow for even the panorama of fall leaves to still reveal beauty and breathtaking insights, and allow for the youth of summer blossoms to radiate, while at the same time giving deference to the others in the haiku of life. It is often through a metaphor like this on a macro-scale that we can then glean a reflective outlook upon the microcosm of our own lives.

For the Federal employee and U.S. Postal worker who sees him or herself as “less than worthy” – somewhat like the dying twigs in a flower arrangement otherwise filled with vibrancy and youth – all because a medical condition is becoming chronic and debilitating, one needs only look upon a flower arrangement that encompasses the triad of life’s natural flow.

Perhaps the agency is like those exploding blossoms of summer; and, more likely, the Federal Agency and the Postal Service will relegate the deadwood into the trash heap of corner offices and ignore those who are less productive. But that is not a reflection upon the Federal or Postal employee who suffers from a medical condition and can no longer perform all of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal position; rather, that is an indictment upon the Federal Agency and the Postal Service itself.

Filing a Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is merely another way to maintain the constancy of society’s unstated promise – much like the flower arrangement that intersperses the dead, the dying and youth – by asserting that legal rights still matter, and a medical condition does not necessarily mean that one’s career is just more deadwood at the back of the arrangement, but can still reveal a promising future for greater productivity in the private sector of life.

They all constitute the arena of “make-believe”. Yet, we excuse the first, ignore the second, and feel guilt and shame for embracing the third – or, at least some of us, do. Of fairytales, we share in the delight of passing on such tall tales of wonderlands and Eskimo nights full of shooting stars and talking Polar Bears; of mythologies, we recognize the need for lost civilizations to have embraced a means of explaining, but consider such trifles to be beyond the sophistication of modernity, and arrogantly dismiss such dusty irrelevancies as mere fodder for a fairytale told: Once upon a time, Man lived in ignorance and could not comprehend the complexities of science, Darwinism and the unseen world of genetic engineering by happenstance of gravitational alliances in planetary designs of explainable phenomena; but we know better, now. But of lies, the second is more akin; the first is excusable as an exception to the rule, especially when the innocence of childhood smiles warms the hearts of parental yearnings.

Rage, effrontery, a sense of betrayal, and a violation of integrity’s core; these become bundled up and spat out into the cauldron of people’s tolerance for acceptable behavior, and from an early age, we instill in children the parallel universes encompassing Fairytales, Mythologies and Lies without an inkling of self-contradiction. And, again, of the middle one, we tolerate as mere poppycock by arrogance of modernity, in order to explain how our forefathers could tolerate that which we reflect in the first but not the third. And of the third, we contend that we can abandon and banish the foundation of a Commandment, while preserving the moral explication justifying the mandate of Truthfulness, and so we embrace the linguistic gymnasts provided by forgotten giants of Philosophy’s past, like Kant’s maxims of universalization of principles otherwise untethered by metaphysical concerns, or even of John Stuart Mill’s failed Utilitarianism.

Then, we allow for exceptions – such as those hypotheticals where the black boots of horror’s past that knock on doors in the middle of the night and inquire as to hidden racial divides in the attic of one’s abode, but where lies and denials are justified in the greater cause of a choice between words and existence in the face of reality, Being and human cruelty. For the person who must live daily within the consequences of what elitists and ivory-towered cocoons revive, the truth is that there never was a problem for most of us, between fairytales, mythologies and lies. The first was for children to enjoy and learn from the lessons of innocence; the second, for adults to study in order to understand the origins of our being; and of the third, we recognize as the soul’s defect in Man.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who must contend with a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of the Federal or Postal position, the identification between the tripartite elements become quickly clear: Fairytales are the promises made by the Federal agency and the U.S. Postal Service; Mythologies are the rules broken by the Federal agency and the U.S. Postal Service, but which are pointed to so as to create an impression of integrity; and lies are those statements made and exposed, but denied daily by the Federal agency and the U.S. Postal Service. In the end, preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is one way of extricating one’s self from such fairytales, mythologies, and lies daily told.

The idealist possesses the dreams of hope and promise; the skeptic, the singe of hurt enough to dampen the spirit; and the cynic, well, he is the grumpy old man who has seen it all, been battered about by the reality of experiential confrontations where tales make the sweat pour from salted wounds too hurtful for words to embrace.

Do they represent a tripartite spectrum of thoughts, feelings and motives, or merely unconnected differences demarcated by time, encounters and length of procrastinated envy? Do we all begin with the zeal of idealism, pass through the comfort of skepticism, then end up bedridden in the cocoon of cynicism? Does generational wisdom conveyed by the old to youth ever pause the bursting bubble of naive relish, where mistakes foreseen and palpably avoidable allow for the wounds of time to be delayed, such that skepticism never enters into the unwelcome gates of a soul’s purity? Or, does destruction of the essence of a person necessarily result in a society where generational transfer of wisdom is scoffed at, and youth and its folly is celebrated merely because beauty is defined by age, sound judgment by pharmaceutical ingestion, and where mistakes made are linguistically altered by clever euphemisms which extinguish not the pain of experiential confrontation, but the narrative which meekly follows?

Whether as inevitable stages of growth and decay, or dots on a graph of spectral divergence, either and all are extremes which reflect the stage of life, experience and historical context which an individual has encountered. For the Federal employee and the U.S. Postal worker whose calloused soul has already been deadened by time and degree of harassment, the additional burden of a medical condition which prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one, if not more than one, of the essential elements of the Federal or Postal job, the time may have come to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, once the Federal or Postal employee reaches the minimum years of eligibility criteria, the proof by a preponderance of the evidence must be shown.

For such a Federal or Postal employee, it matters not whether life has yet to dampen one’s idealism; nor that experiential harassment in the workplace has failed to turn one into a skeptic; or if cynicism has already prevailed, all the more reason to file for OPM Disability Retirement before the pain of the medical condition consumes to the extent that life’s despondency has already wrought. In the end, filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through OPM is a necessity because of life’s encounters, and no man or woman can escape the scars of time, truth of weariness of soul, where the idealist lives on in the forgotten youth of our memories, the skeptic in the hardening callouses of our experience, and cynicism in the dying disregard of one’s mournful essence in losing the sensation of one’s inner being.

The term, “decapitalization” often refers to the deliberate and systematic process of imposing harsh government policies in order to alter the private sector’s hold upon society’s commercial entanglement and mercantile involvement.

In some grammatical contexts, however, it can denote the reduction of capitalized lettering into “small” letters, and thereby change its appearance, import, and even “meaning”. e.e. cummings is a fine example of this. Or, on a “title page”, one would expect that the concept of “Life’s Wisdoms” would be capitalized, for essentially two main reasons: The first word, “Life”, is too great a theme not to ascribe the signification of it, as well as being the beginning part of the title; and the second, well, if it was good enough for Solomon, then we should certainly designate and captivate with a position of priority.

So, why has it been “reduced” in the heading of this short blog, you ask? Because most of life’s wisdoms are not provided at the time of birth on a silver tray packaged in a unitary compendium; rather, they are “dished out” in small increments, over time, through encounters both expected and unasked for; and always when we least desire it.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to impact one’s ability and capacity to perform all of the essential elements of one’s positional duties in the Federal Sector and the U.S. Postal Service, seeking out “information” in order to begin the process of preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management may take on many and variegated forms: Internet Research; contact with the Human Resource Office; call to an attorney; discussions with others who have gone through the administrative and bureaucratic process; unloading upon family and friends, etc.

Always remember, however, that there is a vast chasm of differences between “information” and “wisdom”, and the mere fact that much of information provided “out there” is capitalized with blaring trumpets of fanfare and glitter, ascribing signification by making something into an “upper case” designation, or otherwise in priority of sequence, does not transform the “it” into anything more than what first the skeleton of the entity originated. Saying it doesn’t make it so; dressing it up does not complete a substantive metamorphosis begun in nascent shivers of intended good.

For the Federal employee and the U.S. Postal worker who must make wise decisions concerning one’s future course of actions because filing for OPM Disability Retirement has become a necessity, the conversion from aggregating mere information to obtaining life’s wisdoms must come about first through a decision to decipher and sift through the vast and irrelevant information “out there”, and then to implement a course of action which sounds right, considers the differing interests at hand, and then to emulate the experiential factors we have accumulated over these many years of trials and turmoil.

Seven False Myths about OPM Disability Retirement

1) I have to be totally disabled to get Postal or Federal disability retirement.
False: You are eligible for disability retirement so long as you are unable to perform one or more of the essential elements of your job. Thus, it is a much lower standard of disability.

2) My injury or illness has to be job-related.
False: You can get disability even if your condition is not work related. If your medical condition impacts your ability to perform any of the core elements of your job, you are eligible, regardless of how or where your condition occurred.

3) I have to quit my federal job first to get disability.
False: In most cases, you can apply while continuing to work at your present job, to the extent you are able.

4) I can't get disability if I suffer from a mental or nervous condition.
False: If your condition affects your job performance, you can still qualify. Psychiatric conditions are treated no differently from physical conditions.

5) Disability retirement is approved by DOL Workers Comp.
False: It's the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) the federal agency that administers and approves disability for employees at the US Postal Service or other federal agencies.

6) I can wait for OPM disability retirement for many years after separation.
False: You only have one year from the date of separation from service - otherwise, you lose your right forever.

7) If I get disability retirement, I won't be able to apply for Scheduled Award (SA).
False: You can get a Scheduled Award under the rules of OWCP even after you get approved for OPM disability retirement.